JON SHOOK: I worked the bloom. I learned how to clean a fryer real well. You learn — you actually pick up stuff from everybody. I think I've learned the most from dining. It's important to us to dine a lot. It's almost more important to me to go dine than it is for me to cook. You train your taste buds. Even now, Vinny will make a recipe, and I'll go in the dining room and he'll send it to me and I'll eat it, even though there's nobody else in there. Constructive criticism is the best way to refine a dish.

ESQ: Is one of you more business-minded than the other?

JS: I do lean a little bit more to the business side. But I also cook, you know? Same with Vinny. He's more into the creative side, but he also gets into the business side. We both kind of do everything. Now, our company's at a point where we're starting to think about other projects, like what's the next thing. Everybody wants to know. "You tell me — I want to be the guy who writes the story on the next thing!" We don't know.

ESQ: Are you mostly fielding offers from other people, or imagining what you want to do?

JS: Both. We always want to hear everybody out. The offers come probably two or three a week. New York. San Francisco. Some down here in Florida. Local in L.A. More local than anything else.

ESQ: Really? Animal doesn't feel like an L.A. restaurant in a lot of ways. What are you doing different?

JS: I don't know. Basically, first, the product there is amazing. We're in Southern California. We have the best produce in the world. We buy a certain level of meat product. We use Diamond Ranch, a conglomerate of family-run farms, and a lot of the reason we buy from them is supply and demand. When you're using twenty pounds of pig ears every other day, that's a lot of pigs. You figure six ears per pound. That's three pigs. So that's a lot of fucking heads. So we're trying to use cuts that aren't super-popular.

[Vinny enters.]

ESQ: How do you find good kitchen help?

JS: First, we're pretty particular about who we even let come in and —

VINNY DOTOLO:Stage.

JS: — apply for a job. And then you have a two-day process. It's a stage, and we do a written test. And the written test is super-basic. It's like, how do you make a mayonnaise? Name five spices. Name five herbs. Name three milks that cheese comes from. Like common stuff, right? But a lot of times —

VD: We stump people. You know, what's a stone fruit? Name three stone fruits.

JS: That one's the biggest one. That thing gets people more than anything.

[Vinny walks over to check the oven.]

ESQ: What happens when you guys disagree?

JS: Everybody wants to ask that.

VD [in the background]: What?

JS: About when we disagree. We used to, when we were younger, fight a lot. Now that we're older, it affects the company for us to fight, so we have a pretty good understanding of —

VD: Where we need to go.

JS: Yeah, where we need to go and what bothers the other person. There's a difference between disagreeing and fighting. We disagree a lot. But that creates the company's backbone. I'm more of like a quick thinker. And Vinny, on the other hand, is more of a deep thinker. It might take him a longer time to give you an answer. So it's interesting how that works.

ESQ: Were you guys surprised by the reception of Animal?

JS: I think the coolest and weirdest thing that ever happened to me was the first time I went into the dining room at Animal and I knew nobody out there, and they were smiling and laughing and having a great time. And there we were sweating our fucking balls off — having a great time too, but it was like they were getting it. They understood it. We didn't know anybody out there, and that was that point when you were like, this is cool.

ESQ: Do you ever worry about being the chefs who have a bunch of restaurants but never cook?

JS: We talk about that all the time. We've noticed that the more press you get, the more you're asked to do stuff outside of your kitchens. It is a concern. I love cooking. That's why I do this.

VD: Cooking is the best part of this. Besides eating. But Animal was very haphazard the first few weeks. That was so much of a growth period for us as cooks, chefs, restaurant owners. All these things we had never done before. And now we've done these things, but how do you make those decisions before you actually open? The first few months where you're figuring out some of this stuff though is like you didn't know —

JS: We're still figuring it out.

VD: Plates. I mean it was everything from like you're worrying about plates to the air conditioning breaking. Stuff like, oh shit. It's getting really hot. Where are we going to keep the wine now?

JS: What our goal was in Animal was to fill each seat one time the whole night. That's 45 —

VD: 47 seats.

JS: 45, 47 seats, you know, every day. Now, it's like our standard has turned into each chair twice, sometimes four times. Then the other thing, the other area we made mistakes on at Animal was we probably should have invested a little bit more money. Like, we almost could have waited one more month and had our sound panels put in — but it was stuff we didn't know. "Sound panels? Fuck 'em! So it's loud. We need the money."

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